Edmund Spenser and the romance of space

By Tamsin Badcoe

Edmund Spenser and the romance of space advances the exploration of literary space into new areas, firstly by taking advantage of recent interdisciplinary interests in the spatial qualities of early modern thought and culture, and secondly by reading literature concerning the art of cosmography and navigation alongside imaginative literature with the purpose of identifying shared modes and preoccupations. The book looks to the work of cultural and historical geographers in order to gauge the roles that aesthetic subjectivity and the imagination play in the development of geographical knowledge: contexts ultimately employed by the study to achieve a better understanding of the place of Ireland in Spenser’s writing. The study also engages with recent ecocritical approaches to literary environments, such as coastlines, wetlands, and islands, thus framing fresh readings of Spenser’s handling of mixed genres.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Jul 30, 2019
• ISBN: 9781526139696

Book preview

Introduction

Space melts like sand running through one’s fingers. Time bears it away and leaves me only shapeless threads:

To write: to try meticulously to retain something, to cause something to survive; to wrest a few precise scraps from the void as it grows, to leave somewhere a furrow, a trace, a mark or a few signs.¹

is there a system? What is the centre of it? What the depth? What the connexion? And what the order of the position of the parts?²

In his essay, ‘Species of Spaces’, Georges Perec offers a system for classifying the relationship between space, writing, and the imagination. Perec’s own prose, which is sensitive to the practices of geography and the mutability of worldly experience, seeks to find a series of expressions for the provisional quality implicit in textual and spatial encounters. In the epigraph quoted above, he describes the capacity of the written word to retain something of the world: a process that can be recognised in the various literary geographies of Edmund Spenser’s work.³ It has long been acknowledged, for example, that when Spenser ‘wants to discuss principles or concepts’, as Humphrey Tonkin writes, ‘he organizes them spatially’;⁴ yet, the poet’s images have a characteristic tendency to defy the reader’s grasp. The purpose of this study is not to make another attempt to find unity in Spenser’s fictions or to ‘map’ the spaces of his longest poem: objectives that are, as Matthew Woodcock observes, a ‘perennial feature of Spenser criticism’.⁵ Instead, my interest lies in how Spenser’s writings are preoccupied by moving forms: writing space, it seems, asks the poet both to create and confront contours that outline the relationship between the subject and the changing textures of the geographies in which they dwell.⁶

The readings and analyses I present attend to both the spaces of Spenser’s writings and the poetics of geographical thinking.⁷ My focus rests in the main on The Faerie Queene but also considers the strategies that are shared across Spenser’s poetry and prose, demonstrating how spatial motifs travel across literary forms and take on distinct resonances that depend on circumstance and framing. Taken as a whole, my approach brings together two complementary methodologies: the first considers Spenser’s use of figurative language and his adaptation of literary modes and genres, and the second draws upon interdisciplinary perspectives found in the work of cultural and historical geographers, who engage directly with questions of representation and, more specifically, the roles that aesthetic subjectivity and the imagination play in early modern spatial practices. While no single monograph could claim to be sufficiently capacious to contain a unified field theory of the spaces of Spenser’s writings, the selective approach taken by this study offers a partial view of their variegated qualities.⁸ In the readings that follow, I focus on the relationship between figurative language, genre, and the shaping hand implicit in the writing of geography, reflecting on how these features of Spenser’s work are continually realigned as his longest poem progresses.

As has been frequently acknowledged, The Faerie Queene’s heterogeneous landscapes encompass the local places of antiquarian study as well as the ‘new worlds’ of the Americas; fragments of Ireland jostle against Elizabeth’s England, although most of the time we are somewhere far beyond the margins of any sixteenth-century chart.⁹ Mirroring the reader’s lack of bearings, Spenser’s questing knights, who provide fluctuating focal points within The Faerie Queene’s six complete books, generally travel without the instrumental aids available to sixteenth-century travellers, preferring a course plotted ‘withouten compasse, or withouten card’ (III.ii.7). The most basic tools of navigation are unworkable in spaces shaped by the imagination, cultural memory, and the conscience, or where, as Harry Berger, Jr. has observed, ‘psyche is scarcely separable from nature, inscape from landscape’.¹⁰ Instead, Spenser’s knights, questing in pursuit of holiness, temperance, chastity, friendship, justice, and courtesy, seem to be guided by the exercise of their hidden virtue as if it were a compass needle pointing homewards. The complete path remains occluded, its endpoint as problematic to fix as true north.

I describe The Faerie Queene in these terms in order to give a sense of why Spenserian criticism, as demonstrated by the work of Wayne Erickson, Bernhard Klein, Joanne Woolway Grenfell, and Christopher Burlinson, amongst others, has long been fascinated by the geographical, generic, conceptual, and structural landscapes of the poem. At the time of their publication in 1590, the first three books of Spenser’s epic allegorical romance constituted the longest printed poem written in the English language, making the work an impressively spacious production even without the publication of an additional three books in 1596.¹¹ Famously, the poem begins in medias res, and, without Ariadne’s yarn to ensure safe passage, the task of following its many interlaced narratives, shaped by chance encounters, misrecognitions, and acts of abandonment and deception, is often disorientating. The poem’s labyrinthine qualities are produced by narrative deferrals as well as an aesthetic interest in the creation of a landscape of quest and ‘straunge aduentures’ (I.i.30). The poet ultimately offers readers an interpretive challenge which is shared by the poem’s protagonists, inviting them to contemplate the relationship between, and nature of, the mobile spaces of his fiction. Such spaces are sufficiently capacious to contain not only echoes of the wanderings of biblical and classical archetypes and exiles, the pilgrimages of saints, the errancy of native and continental romance, but also reflections on the expeditions and discoveries of the early modern navigators, for whom the prize always seemed to lie further away.¹²

Various forms of travel invite the contemplation of different kinds of epistemological horizon, from the historical and the spiritual, to those of conquest, both erotic and territorial. When Spenser uses the word ‘space’ in The Faerie Queene, it is almost always to convey either the passage of time or ‘the interval between objects’,¹³ where events can be seen to happen ‘Some in short space, and some in longer yeares’ (VII.vii.55); only during the final complete book does the narrator take the opportunity to look back over the ‘exceeding spacious’ (VI.pro.1) qualities of the poem he has fashioned. In The Faerie Queene the experience of space unfurls in time: the time in which the reader dwells within the poem’s unfolding stanzaic progress and in the shifting temporal patterns of the poem’s interlaced narratives. Spenser uses the allegorical motion of bodies travelling at different speeds to suggest the cognitive elision of the spatial and the temporal.¹⁴ Throughout these travails, the representation of duration, velocity, and labour is complicated by the changing scales of human history, by moments of transformation and recurrence, and even, finally, by recognition, revelation, and the contemplation of apocalypse.

A reader of The Faerie Queene is thus tasked with finding a way through the poem that allows for meaningful interpretation to occur without shutting down the work’s capacity for generating perplexity. Spenser’s purpose in his longest poem may ultimately be didactic but it is a curiously provisional type of knowledge that he advances. As a writer of romance, he delights in deferral, and the cumulative refusal to provide readers with oversight generates writing, both poetic and political, that is characterised by the figuration of error, ignorance, folly, and testing travail.¹⁵ Owing to its fusion of romance with epic and allegory, The Faerie Queene contains a multitude of potential trajectories: within such a generic welter, distinct spatial imaginaries mobilise divergent itineraries. The ‘romance quester’, as James Nohrnberg has observed of Spenser’s challenging combination of literary models, ‘is typically sent away from his homeland, in order to find his way back to it, while the epic quester migrates towards a homeland, in order to leave a past behind’.¹⁶ In addition, the allegorical frame, and the inclusion of metaphysical vanishing points such as heaven and the New Jerusalem, cause obvious problems for anyone trying to conceive of the poem’s dimensions.¹⁷ For Christopher Burlinson, the representations of physical places in Spenser’s poetry, such as fortifications, forests, and hovels, retain the memory of the social and political structures that shaped them; because of this, the cognitive abstractions of allegory are complicated by ‘a physical presence … that fits awkwardly with the idea of allegorical narrative as a transcendence of the material’.¹⁸ Furthermore, the earthiness of much of Spenser’s imagery, and the residual implications of his interests in the relationships existing between environment, labour, and stasis, invite considerations of the pastoral and georgic:¹⁹ modes that have received recent energising attention from literary ecologists, whose writing on the subject of literature and territory has been particularly generative in recent years.²⁰

With the poem’s disparate and turbulent elements in mind, I am particularly interested in how its geographical forms invite an appreciation of how the poet imagines change and movement. For Spenser, protagonists typically occupy states of suspension, searching for lost loves, homes, and identities; as exiles moving ‘in the wide deepe wandring’ (I.ii.1), which may manifest as forest or sea, or other desert waste on the margins of cultivation, they move through spaces in which conclusive knowledge and fulfilment is deferred. As Kenneth Gross has observed of Spenser’s labyrinthine work: ‘to be in place is no simple thing …, where any site is likely … to be other than itself, a surface to be fallen through, a where that is also an elsewhere’.²¹ And indeed, as Britomart discovers when her bed falls through a false floor at the house of Dolon, the ground on which one stands is not always terra firma: an example of Spenser’s plotting that also comments on the experience of attempting to interpret the poet’s images. Such sites are meta-fictions, self-referential in their ability to give form to the poet’s meanings.

By building on Wayne Erickson’s sense of Spenser’s ‘multiform narrative world’ in the chapters that follow, I explore the ways in which Spenser’s spaces are produced by the conceptual blends that occur alongside and across expected boundaries;²² the literary geographies he creates can, I suggest, be thought of as ecotonal, to borrow a term from environmental science, in that they occupy the fertile imaginative ground that emerges when the distinct spatial imaginaries associated with the ‘rhetorical ecosystems’ of particular genres and traditions converge and interact.²³ An ecotonal reading of Spenser, whose deft handling of the meeting of modes delights in in-betweenness, offers a way of thinking about the vagrant qualities of Spenser’s work without needing to solve or reconcile them: for Spenser, occupying the ground between distinct literary habitats frequently results in imaginative fecundity rather than wreck.²⁴ It is perhaps no coincidence that Spenser’s imagination, in a complementary movement, is drawn instinctively to the representation of places in the natural world where ecotonal transitions occur: an open plain becoming a wandering wood, wetlands and islands, or freshwater channels that lose distinction at the saline margins of the sea.²⁵

Such interstitial dwelling places for the imagination cease being static literary topoi, or common places, in Spenser’s writings and instead perform the self-conscious activity of the poet, imitative of both world and creative process: the poet’s gestures towards the familiar, the grounded, and the proximate are typically distanced or undermined by habits of thought that rely on figurative language to turn, or move, from one place to somewhere else entirely, thus testing the limits of the credible.²⁶ Underlying these complex allegorical geographies is the poem’s deep concern with the fixity of knowledge; the positive, generative energy of Spenser’s advancing knights is pitched against the deconstructive motion of the endless quests. In a poem where appearances are often deceptive, the author, as Nick Davis observes, refuses to answer the question ‘of whether fixity of structure is to be encountered by human beings in the cosmos they inhabit’.²⁷ As the author and architect of the fiction, Spenser writes of the impossibility of representing his subject truthfully; his craft is subject to error and frailty, suggesting that the travail of building the world of the work is a task that mirrors the complexity of its navigation. Landmarks often only ‘seemd to bee’ (II.xi.35) and the guiding ‘stedfast starre’ is frequently occluded by ‘foggy mistes, or cloudy tempests’ (II. vii.1). Within a poem whose spatial master-trope takes the form of an urban centre of ‘idealized government … which no one ever visits’, as Michael J. Murrin writes, the poet’s labours often consciously seem to undo themselves:²⁸ without a sense of centre, an exile has nowhere to return. And yet, it is a testimony to the poet’s skill that the questions asked by Francis Bacon in his Descriptio Globi Intellectualis concerning the order of the heavens – questions which seek to fathom, to compass, to orientate, and finally, to understand – can also be asked, if not satisfactorily answered, of Spenser’s ‘continued Allegory, or darke conceit’ (‘A Letter of the Authors’, p. 714).

Spenser and the poetics of space

It has been claimed that ‘space appears to have lost its poetry’ in the seventeenth century, thereby unshackling itself from the interventions of myth, theology, visual language, and allegory.²⁹ Yet, for Spenser at the close of the sixteenth century, both life and work coincided with a wider cultural fascination for the discovery of ‘new worlds’ and the aesthetic and ideological repercussions prompted by the writing and re-writing of cosmos and nation.³⁰ This study argues that the imaginative literature of the late sixteenth century is shaped by a shifting epistemological moment, in which the wanderings of romance, and its relationship to allegory, were called into question by new ways of making knowledge. This is nowhere more evident than in Spenser’s unfinished attempt at writing what should have been, by his own account, a national epic. Spenser’s poetry reached print at a time when the book trade was saturated with practical guides concerning how to direct a ship’s course, descriptions of the regional landscape and the cultural memories embedded therein, collections of maps which offered the beholder mastery over the spaces they portray, and translations of technical manuals made available for the first time in vernacular English.³¹ In a marginal annotation located in his copy of Thomas Twyne’s translation of Dionysius Periegetes’s The Surveye of the World (1572), for example, Spenser’s friend Gabriel Harvey reflected on his wonder that ‘Chaucer and Lydgate were such good astronomers’ and also revealed that ‘Spenser himself is ashamed, though he is not completely ignorant of the globe and astrolabe, of the difficulty he has with astronomical rules, tables, and instruments’.³² If this brief insight into Spenser’s intellectual predilections does not demonstrate the poet’s mastery of spatial techne, it does at least signal his engagement with the challenges of spatial measurement and representation.³³ It is no coincidence that The Faerie Queene continually addresses the topic of how to approach unseen, unknown, or unconquered terrain; generic forms that were developed, if not perfected in the Middle Ages, were met head-on in the sixteenth century by new epistemological perspectives, which became increasingly invested in the relationship between abstraction and experience.³⁴

Medieval constructions of the inhabited world, which fixed Jerusalem and the contemplation of salvation at their centre, contrast starkly with those visualised by the likes of Abraham Ortelius, author in 1570 of the world’s first atlas. In his world maps, the centralisation of the Atlantic Ocean displaces the viewer’s sense of focus, as John Gillies explains: in ‘place of the comfort of the medieval map we find restlessness, in place of stasis: dynamism’.³⁵ The beholder’s gaze, unnaturally beholding an expanding world, as Gillies writes, privileges the ‘unknown and unpossessed over the known and possessed’, and thus authorises a ‘semiosis of desire’.³⁶ For Jonathan Goldberg, a similar driving principle can be identified in Spenser’s longest poem: in the shared responsibility of author and reader to make meaning, the poem holds together ‘an endlesse worke of substitution’ characterised by ‘sequences of names in place of other names, structures of difference, deferred identities’.³⁷ As the following chapters discuss in more detail, the deconstructive fluidity Goldberg observes in Spenser’s writing is at work in the cartographic, navigational, and cosmographical enterprises of his contemporaries.³⁸ As provisional products, their crafted surfaces are open to transformation by brief and often contradictory eddies of mutable space. By reading Spenser’s poem alongside such writings, I explore what is involved in the translation of world to word and image and back again: a legacy of the longstanding history of connection between cosmography and epic.³⁹

In the following chapters I investigate more fully how the skilled craftsmanship associated with the spatial arts also relies on the writerly techniques of persuasive rhetoric in order to assert authority.⁴⁰ Acts of making, or poiesis, are aspects of geographical practice which have received increasing critical attention in recent years owing to a new critical emphasis placed on how the ethical significance of spatial representation coexists with the performativity and materiality of the geographer’s labour. At the heart of such processes, Denis Cosgrove argues, is ‘a philosophy and vision of a perfectable world’ that finds its origin in textual practices.⁴¹ As a consequence of his employment in Ireland as part of Elizabeth I’s administration, Spenser’s geographical imagination is inflected by the compromised views of late sixteenth-century colonialism: an activity which defined ideas of reformation and perfection through a set of subjective and strategic perspectives.⁴² In the mind of the Anglo-Irish poet W.B. Yeats, for example, Spenser was blinded by Elizabeth’s colonial agenda, seeing only what was required of him:

he wrote as an official, and out of thoughts and emotions that had been organised by the State. He was the first of many Englishmen to see nothing but what he was desired to see. Could he have gone there as a poet merely, he might have found among its poets more wonderful imaginations than even those islands of Phaedria and Acrasia. He would have found among wandering story-tellers, not indeed his own power of rich, sustained description, for that belongs to lettered ease, but certainly all the kingdom of Faery, still unfaded, of which his own poetry was often but a troubled image.⁴³

In passing judgement on the nature of Spenser’s ‘sustained description’, Yeats highlights the burden of responsibility that falls upon writers of imaginative literature; it is telling that Arcadian spaces of potential ease are characteristically invaded, dismantled, and abandoned in Spenser’s work.⁴⁴ For Yeats, Spenser could have encountered an island space capable of surpassing even his own most seductive fictions; had he so wished, Yeats speculates, this impossible Spenser could have enacted and recorded an encounter of a different order, one of both island and self. It is a fiction perhaps as misrepresentative as Spenser’s own, but out of which a dream of a lost literary geography emerges: a geography that had the potential to be ethically and poetically superior to that of Spenser’s own ‘troubled image’. For a modern reader, it is impossible to see how the cultural imagination of the early modern period could ever have been situated outside the cross-currents of imperial desire; after all, no poet went anywhere during this period as ‘a poet merely’.⁴⁵

To search for space in Spenser’s writing, then, is to find it subject to multiple forms of fabrication and speculation.⁴⁶ Critics such as Rhonda Lemke Sanford, Mercedes Camino, and Donald Kimball Smith, for example, have looked to Spenser’s work for an intellectual engagement with particular kinds of early modern spatial practices such as cartography.⁴⁷ Smith, for one, elegantly argues that The Faerie Queene incorporates the transformations implicit in moving from medieval to early modern conceptions of space; however, his sense that the poem ultimately functions as a memory theatre in which the protagonists’ wanderings accrue in the reader’s mind ‘in the coherent and comprehensive way that a map allows’ is more problematic.⁴⁸ Tellingly, his argument rests on examples taken from the first three books of the poem and makes little mention of Spenser’s involvement in Ireland. If the later books of The Faerie Queene and A View of the Present State of Ireland (c. 1596; pub. 1633) suggest anything, it is that memory, like cartographical representation, can be manipulated.⁴⁹

A more successful model of the relationship between mapping and the arts of memory, this study suggests, would allow for a more heightened awareness of the generative potential of mobility, strategy, and fallibility:⁵⁰ the ‘pervasive metaphorics of navigation’ in early modern texts suggest that readers were highly attuned to the epistemological challenges of charts.⁵¹ Bernhard Klein’s work on the ‘anti-cartographic’ nature of The Faerie Queene’s terrain, for example, decisively concludes that ‘the crucial point is not how much real geography finds its way into the poem …; rather, the poem undertakes to question the epistemological significance of space as such, and to describe its power to define the existential state of the fictional characters moving through it’.⁵² In addition, a consideration of the inherently provisional quality of cartographical enterprises allows for a more nuanced recognition of performativity and dynamism in spite of the pretence of two dimensional stasis. Joanne Woolway Grenfell, for example, has shown how Spenser’s choice not to include maps in The Faerie Queene is to make the point that ‘real knights don’t need maps – because … Spenser was also charting a course through representational boundaries which had suddenly become fluid’.⁵³ Her own use of metaphorical language is suggestive of the contingencies implicit in sea travel: where land maps implicitly invite a mobile eye and intellect, the art of navigation explicitly emphasises process over completion and also assumes a mobile self or body, moving within an environment that is itself unpredictable and in flux.

Spatial metaphors provide both a useful model for negotiating the relationship between abstraction and experience and a series of analogies for the active reading that The Faerie Queene requires. As this study argues, Spenser’s writing, both poetry and prose, participates in wayward movements that are shared by both early modern cosmographical discourse and by fiction-making.⁵⁴ When Roland Greene suggests that The Faerie Queene ‘everywhere displays multiple, partial, and emergent worlds’, for example, he mobilises a way of thinking that relates not only to the practices of early modern geography but also to the relationship between the self and the other, between social and political reality, and between cultural history and the creation of an individual literary reputation.⁵⁵ For my purposes, the activities Greene outlines are constantly shaped by the contours of the natural environment, which are sometimes complicit in and sometimes resistant to ‘worldmaking’ as a purely intellectual process. More recently, Patrick Cheney has argued that poets of the early modern period ‘use their world-making invention to invite readers to remake objective reality in light of imaginative vision’.⁵⁶ The relationship he describes between the activity of the author and the engagement of the reader is a vital one; yet, as this study argues, it is frequently ‘objective’ vision itself that is questioned.⁵⁷

The spaces under discussion here are typically those that do not yet present a continuous or ‘objective’ reality to the person perceiving them, such as islands and other littoral spaces. The fragments of worlds that pass in and out of view in the following chapters – spaces such as the cosmos, the coastline, ‘elsewhere’, ‘nowhere’, and finally, and most problematically, England and Ireland – do not retain ideal forms.⁵⁸ Each space tests the limits of the author’s skill as imitator and inventor and illuminates an aspect of what Ayesha Ramachandran has recently identified as the ‘increasing emphasis in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries on worldly plurality, contingency, and the limitations of human perception and knowledge’.⁵⁹ In Spenser’s longest poem the spatial imagination may temporarily inhabit open plains and ‘desert wildernesse’ (II. vii.2) but it returns repeatedly to horizons, edges, and impasses, offering a topological account of intellectual complexity and how this is shaped by a lived environment.⁶⁰

The relationship between the local and the global, and the conception of ‘world’ itself, is receiving increasing attention in the comparative study of early modern literature;⁶¹ however, an academic interest in the relationship between geography and the imagination is not new. As John K. Wright observed in his presidential address to the Association of American Geographers in 1946, anticipating many of the thinkers and writers acknowledged above, ‘the most fascinating terrae incognitae of all are those that lie within the minds and hearts of men’.⁶² After musing on the imaginative power held latent in cartographical regions marked as terra incognita on antique maps, Wright contemplated the role that aesthetic subjectivity plays in the development of geographical knowledge. Designed predominantly as an early appeal for more interdisciplinary exchange between geographers and humanities scholars, his speech called to mind Odysseus, bound securely to the mast of his ship: ears open to the sound of the Sirens’ song, the mariner, a figure for the geographer himself, allows his imagination to be kindled by the sound. The myth functions for Wright as a way of figuring epistemological limits and, as he would later observe, it is ‘the errors of an age’ that are ‘as characteristic as the accurate knowledge which it possesses – and often more so’.⁶³ His words give further emphasis to the notion that ‘situated knowledge’, as Derek Gregory writes, ‘is not a barrier to understanding but rather its very condition’.⁶⁴

Spenser’s halting errant knights are situated knowers. Samuel Taylor Coleridge famously remarked that the world Spenser created in his longest poem ‘is the domain neither of history or geography; it is ignorant of all artificial boundary, all material obstacles; it is truly a land of Fairy, that is, of mental space’; however, this study suggests that the distinction he implies is a false one.⁶⁵ Spenser is a spatial maker whose imaginative and epistemological horizons were shaped by his lived and literary experiences, and these in turn shaped the travails of his protagonists. For writers of the sixteenth century, the perception of terra incognita may have been a necessary condition for the construction of the utopian text;⁶⁶ yet, for Spenser, early modern Ireland, where he spent most of his adult working life as both poet and planter, was far from deserted, even if non-native textual representations frequently attempted to make it appear so.⁶⁷ To consider the complexities of ‘mental space’, then, is to consider that which Coleridge seeks to erase: namely, the intentions and agendas in which Spenser was complicit, and the ways in which these informed the depiction of temporal and spatial relations between subjects and objects.⁶⁸ In seeking to complicate Coleridge’s dismissal of geography and its cognate disciplines in order to reanimate the poetry that contributes to geographical, hydrographical, chorographical, and cosmographical ways of thinking in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, this study addresses the speculative undertakings of those tasked with representing the spaces through which minds and bodies move.

Structure

Reading Spenser’s work invites an understanding of how particular spatial practices are already shaped and mediated by literary forms, figures, and fictions. In the writing of world, place, and waters, authors fashion textual spaces that connect memory and desire to knowledge claims and intellectual, but subjective, processes. This study is divided into two parts: the first addresses the issue of thinking spatially through a focus on literary matters such as representation, rhetoric, and genre; the second, through its readings of particular terrains, moves towards furthering our understanding of how the writing of space, even in fiction, is never a politically neutral act. The first part takes most of its examples from Books I, II, and III of The Faerie Queene; the second part reads across the rest of the poem and a selection of Spenser’s shorter poems and prose, which have been chosen because they complement the readings of The Faerie Queene directly. A longer book would have the space to address the shorter poems more generously, but for my purposes here they lie just beyond the horizon.

Part I: Orientations

In order to frame the readings of the curious spaces of Edmund Spenser’s generically hybrid Faerie Queene, the first part of this study explores the use of spatial images to perform, describe, and interrogate the accrual of knowledge: a technique Spenser inherits from writers and thinkers from the Middle Ages and antiquity. Extracts from two major works concerning cosmography and navigation are examined alongside the first part of Spenser’s Faerie Queene in order to provide analogous models for the aesthetics and function of Spenser’s spaces; the imaginative travail Spenser asks of his readers finds parallels in the perceptual travail demanded by early modern authors of non-fiction. These voices are more than contextual aids: reading Spenser’s poetry and prose also helps us to appreciate their knowledge-making processes more fully. The literary making that happens at Spenser’s hands is no less present in the work of his practically-minded contemporaries; their imaginations chase the promise of an ordered cosmos, chartable oceans, and clearly labelled insular and coastal maps, and the figurative language they use to accomplish their pursuits often resorts, like that of modern critics, to what Michael Booth describes as ‘a spatial vocabulary as [the] ultimate grounds of argument’.⁶⁹ The rhetorical practices they have in common would even have been considered spatial practices in their own right, as the work of Mary Carruthers suggests: ‘cognitive craft’, she explains, is bound to conceptions of inventio or ‘invention’, which pertains to both the art of creation and the act of imposing structure, as well as to the production of ‘locational memory’.⁷⁰

In the first chapter, I introduce the ways in which early modern works of cosmography and navigation employ literary techniques for didactic purposes and examine the ways in which reading their strategic rhetoric offers a parallel project to reading Spenser’s own fashioning of space and myth. The chapter focuses on self-consciously literary moments found in two works that deal with spaces that are particularly difficult to imagine, namely the cosmos in William Cuningham’s The Cosmographical Glasse (1559) and the sea and shore in Lucas Janzoon Waghenaer’s The Mariners Mirrour (1584; trans. 1588). The chapter establishes the role that inherently spatial motifs and metaphors, including the figure of the labyrinth and the perspective glass, play in questions of interpretative difficulty, and this informs my approach to Spenser’s use of allegory, and his interest in error in particular. Identifying the contrasting approaches of Cuningham and Waghenaer to their subjects also opens up a debate concerning the relative values of abstraction and experience, and hints at the participation of technical writing in a spatial imaginary shaped by the epic mode. In an age that increasingly prided itself on cartographical literacy and purposeful travel, deliberate wandering, even by characters in fiction, is called into question precisely because they should know better.

Chapter 2 expands the first chapter’s interest in the rhetoric of error and considers the ways in which The Faerie Queene constantly questions the nature of directive authority: in Spenser’s poem, a succession of figures representing false and true guidance results in the creation of an epistemological geography concerned with measurement, orientation, and memory. The chapter focuses on the relationship between the body and the determination of whereabouts in order to think about how Spenser uses ‘moving metaphor’ to model states of virtue and knowing,⁷¹ and tests the premise that Spenser’s allegories engage in debates concerning not only the mode’s efficacy but also the extent to which man, to borrow the formulation of Protagoras, can truly be considered as ‘the measure of all things’.⁷²

Chapter 3 moves the discussion from allegory into new generic terrain and attends to the spatial paradoxes and utopian drives of romance, paying particular attention to the relationship between the natural environment and the landscape of chivalry. Romance is traditionally associated with marvellous settings and the traversal of impossible distance; yet, in the late sixteenth century, the mode was also associated with inertia, passivity, and the petrifaction of knowledge. It is famed for its dilatory qualities and its tendency to postpone endings for the delight and entertainment of an audience; however, as critics such as Andrew King have observed, Spenser’s Faerie Queene offers a radical reassessment of the mode.⁷³ In Spenser’s hands, the epistemological strategies of romance allow for both deliberate plotting and regressive drift, and the chapter places particular emphasis on the capacity of imaginative literature to confront conditions of uncertainty and ignorance. The reading of romance landscapes provides context for Britomart’s encounter with Merlin, which provides the focus of Chapter 4. At the heart of this chapter is a reading of Merlin’s glass: a perspectival object that acts as a focus for the critical perspectives put in motion throughout the first part of the study. The chapter thinks about how to gauge the changing scales of Britomart’s journey by reading her quest alongside the spatial arts of cosmography and chorography, and looks back to the readings of Cuningham and Waghenaer established in Chapter 1. In seeking out the maker of her vision, Spenser’s lady-knight makes the transition from speculative armchair traveller to practical wayfarer.

Part II: Environments

The second part of the study draws more substantially on lines of enquiry proposed by the arguments of cultural and historical geographers, whose work considers the thought, language, and speculations of early modern literature in ways that are historically and materially located. The rhetorical strategies and aesthetics of historical practices have implications for literary depictions of travel and geography, particularly those that invest in what Paul Carter has described as ‘the spatial forms and fantasies through which a culture declares its presence’.⁷⁴ Authors of the late sixteenth century, it seems, grapple in highly imaginative ways with problems that are still encountered by modern theorists and critics when attempting to define space, place, and landscape as categories of analysis;⁷⁵ as such, an ever-expanding body of work by cultural historians and literary critics has been responsive to the textual practices of geography and the spaces that shape, and are produced by, the early modern imagination.⁷⁶ The contemporary challenge issued by the geographer Doreen Massey to the assumption that space acts as ‘a surface, continuous and given’, for example, offers a particularly vital way of framing Spenser’s geopolitical allegories; thinking about space as a dynamic ‘meeting up of histories’ and a ‘simultaneity of stories-so-far’, as she advocates, serves to illuminate the fissures created by ideological divergence.⁷⁷ In Spenser’s case, this manifests most perceptively in his writing about Ireland: both The Faerie Queene and A View of the Present State of Ireland illuminate the challenges of constructing a single coherent narrative, and both occupy forms that rely on increasingly strained polyphony. Acquiring a sense of geographical complexity undoes any trust in allegorical fixity.

In recent years, in order to address the impact of the mapping, plotting, navigating, illustrating, and surveying undertaken by numerous printed and manuscript works on the creative literature of the period, critics have striven to develop new terminologies and interdisciplinary methodologies with which to discuss concepts of space, place, geography, landscape, and language.⁷⁸ In Chapter 5, I consider the work done by a tidal, hydrographical imagination, reading the coastal imaginaries of The Faerie Queene’s middle books alongside works by John Dee and Sir Walter Ralegh. The tideline is considered as an emblematic space, characterised by recurrent images of gain and loss, in which personal desire is put under pressure by nationalistic dreams of empire. Chapter 6, which addresses Spenser’s ‘personal curvature’, borrows a term used by the historical geographer J.H. Andrews to describe ‘the subjective element in a cartographer’s linework’ in order to suggest that analogous distortions can be seen in writings by Spenser and other Englishmen to cross the Irish Sea.⁷⁹ Focusing on the fifth and sixth books of The Faerie Queene and moments from a variety of prose texts, this chapter considers the perceived textures of the Irish environment, including its wandering coastlines and unstable wetlands, in order to argue that the westward gaze of Spenser and his fellow literary strategists struggled to find a rhetoric of discovery that could also acknowledge the frustrations of partial and provisional knowledge. The final chapter connects the threads of previous readings and explores Spenser’s intertextual blend of genres through the perspective of insularity. By reading the manipulation of ‘mental space’ as a tool of propaganda, this chapter considers the role of insularity in the early modern colonial imaginary and examines the irreconcilable perspectives found in ‘Colin Clouts Come Home Againe’ (1595), A View of the Present State of Ireland, and the last books of The Faerie Queene, including the Mutabilitie Cantos (1609). By moving between and across coastlines, wetlands, and islands I thus offer ways of navigating the shifting, ecotonal spaces of Spenser’s fictions.

1Georges Perec, Species of Spaces in Species of Spaces and Other Pieces , ed. and trans. John Sturrock (London: Penguin, 1997; repr. 1999), pp. 1–96 (pp. 91–2).

2Francis Bacon, A Description of the Intellectual Globe , in The Philosophical Works of Francis Bacon , ed. John M. Robertson (Oxford: Routledge, 1905; repr. 2011), pp. 670–702 (p. 689).

3For the range of methods encompassed by ‘literary geography’ see Angharad Saunders, ‘Literary Geography: Reforging the Connections’, Progress in Human Geography , 34.4 (2010), 436–52. For a classic introduction to the landscapes of poetry see Ernst Robert Curtius, ‘The Ideal Landscape’, in European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages , trans. Willard R. Trask (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1953), pp. 183–202.

4Humphrey Tonkin, ‘Spenser’s Garden of Adonis and Britomart’s Quest’, PMLA , 88.3 (1973), 408–17, p. 409. See also R. Rawdon Wilson, ‘Space’, in SEnc , pp. 666–7.

5Matthew Woodcock, Fairy in The Faerie Queene: Renaissance Elf-Fashioning and Elizabethan Myth-Making (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), p. 78 (see also pp. 76–80).

6The meaning of the word geography is, as Trevor J. Barnes and James S. Duncan observe, ‘literally earth writing (from the Greek geo , meaning earth, and graphien , meaning to write)’. See ‘Introduction: Writing Worlds’, in Writing Worlds: Discourse, Text, and Metaphor in the Representation of Landscape (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 1–17 (p. 1).

7For analysis of Giambattista Vico’s concept of ‘poetic geography’ see John Gillies, Shakespeare and the Geography of Difference (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 39.

8For the ‘manifold capacity’ of the FQ see James Nohrnberg, The Analogy of The Faerie Queene (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976). ‘Each book’, as Thomas P. Roche, Jr. has observed, ‘has a life of its own’. See The Kindly Flame: A Study of the Third and Fourth Books of Spenser’s Faerie Queene (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964), p. 32.

9More literal mapping exercises such as those carried out by Terence Clifford-Amos may work in limited localities but as a whole the poem resists and undermines such attempts. See ‘Certaine Signes of Faeryland: Spenser’s Eden of Thanksgiving on the Defeat of the Monstrous Dragon of Albion’s North’, Viator , 32 (2001), 371–415. See also Philip Edwards, Sea-Mark: The Metaphorical Voyage, Spenser to Milton (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1997), p. 27.

10 Harry Berger, Jr., Revisionary Play: Studies in the Spenserian Dynamics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), p. 107.

11 See Andrew Zurcher, ‘Printing The Faerie Queene in 1590’, Studies in Bibliography , 57 (2005), 115–50.

12 See, for example, Mary C. Fuller, ‘Ralegh’s Fugitive Gold: Reference and Deferral in The Discoverie of Guiana ’, Representations